README.md

metadata

license: mit
task_categories:
  - text-generation
  - fill-mask
tags:
  - memes
  - humor
  - byte-level
  - english
size_categories:
  - 100K<n<1M

meme-text-corpus

Meme joke text (template names + captions + labels), structured for template-conditioned generation of byte-level language models. Built for training BDH (Baby Dragon Hatchling, vocab=256 raw bytes) — contains text only, no images.

Files

File	Contents
meme_text_corpus.txt	Byte-level training rendering (TEMPLATE: / TEXT: / --- records)
meme_text_corpus.jsonl	One JSON record per line with metadata (schema below)

Schema (JSONL)

{"source": "dank_learning"|"memotion2",
 "template": str,                 // meme template slug, e.g. "y u no", "brian bad news"
 "text": str,                     // caption text (single line, whitespace-normalized)
 // Memotion 2.0 rows additionally carry:
 "humor"?: str, "sarcasm"?: str, "offensive"?: str, "sentiment"?: str, "split"?: str}

Text rendering format (.txt):

TEMPLATE: y u no
TEXT: steve jobs y u no respawn?!
---

Sources & licenses

Source	License	Contribution
Dank Learning (memegenerator.net scrape, 2018; paper arXiv:1806.04510)	MIT	~411k template-caption pairs (majority of corpus)
Memotion 2.0	Research dataset — see its dataset card; labels used as metadata only	~7k OCR'd meme texts with humor/sarcasm/offensive/sentiment labels
imgflip get_memes API	imgflip ToS	100-template taxonomy reference (metadata only, no caption text)

Cleaning

• Exact dedup on whitespace/case-normalized text; near-dedup with word-3-gram Jaccard ≥ 0.8 within (template, first-3-words) buckets.
• Filters (excluded, counts in CORPUS_REPORT.md): non-English heuristic, slur/hateful blocklist, explicit-sexual-content list, Memotion very_offensive rows, length outside [8, 600] chars.
• Mild profanity remains — meme text is crude by nature. The offensive label is preserved for downstream filtering.

Known limitations

• 2018-era meme culture (memegenerator.net); dated references.
• Captions are single-line (top/bottom split not recoverable from the source).
• English-only by construction; non-English filter is heuristic.

Reproduction

Full pipeline + scripts: see the create-datasets project repo (scrapers/, scripts/, qc/, CORPUS_REPORT.md).